Desktop management

The command to allow PCManFM to set wallpapers and enable the use of desktop icons is:

pcmanfm --desktop

The native desktop menu of the window manager will be replaced with that provided by PCManFM. However, it can easily be restored from the PCManFM menu itself by selecting Desktop preferences and then enabling the Right click shows WM menu option in the Desktop tab.

Desktop preferences

If using the native desktop menu provided by a window manager, enter the following command to set or amend desktop preferences at any time:

$ pcmanfm --desktop-pref

It is worthwhile to consider adding this command to a keybind and/or the native desktop menu for easy access.

Creating new icons

User content such as text files, documents, images and so forth can be dragged and dropped directly onto the desktop. To create shortcuts for applications it will be necessary to copy their .desktop files to the ~/Desktop directory itself. Do not drag and drop the files there as they will be moved completely. The syntax of the command to do so is:

cp /usr/share/applications/<name of application>.desktop ~/Desktop

For example - where installed - to create a desktop shortcut for lxterminal, the following command would be used:

cp /usr/share/applications/lxterminal.desktop ~/Desktop

For those who used the XDG user directories program to create their $HOME directories no further configuration will be required.

Daemon mode

To run PCManFM in the background (to for example automatically mount removable media), use:

Autostarting

How PCManFM may be autostarted as a daemon process or to manage the desktop for a standalone window manager will depend on the window manager itself. For example, to enable management of the desktop for Openbox, the following command would be added to the ~/.config/openbox/autostart file:

pcmanfm --desktop &

Review the relevant wiki article and/or official home page for a particular installed or intended window manager. Should a window manager not provide an autostart file, PCManFM may be alternatively autostarted by editing one or both of the following files:

Additional features and functionality

Less experienced users should be aware that a file manager alone - especially when installed in a standalone Window manager such as Openbox - will not provide the features and functionality users of full desktop environments such as Xfce and KDE will be accustomed to. Review the file manager functionality article for further information.

Tips and tricks

Get thumbnails for other file types

Notes: This section is not specific to PCManFM. (Discuss in Talk:PCManFM#)

PCManFM supports image thumbnails out of the box. However, in order to view thumbnails of other file types, PCManFM uses the information provided in the files located at /usr/share/thumbnailers. The packages which provide a thumbnailer usually add the corresponding .thumbnail file at /usr/share/thumbnailers. For example, in order to get thumbnails for OpenDocument files, you may install libgsf from the official repositories. For video files' thumbnails, the package ffmpegthumbnailer is required. For PDF files, you may install evince from the official repositories, which provides evince-thumbnailer and the corresponding file at /usr/share/thumbnailers. However, if you prefer not to install evince, you can also replicate the functionality of evince-thumbnailer using imagemagick's convert command. This is accomplished by creating a new file with the .thumbnailer extension (e.g.: imagemagick-pdf.thumbnailer) at /usr/share/thumbnailers with the following content:

Note: The [0] next to the input file is specified so that convert only generates a thumbnail of the first page. This is a convert-specific syntax and has nothing to do with the syntax of the thumbnailers' files.

Following this example, you can specify custom thumbnailers by creating your own .thumbnail files. Keep in mind that %i refers to the input file (the file which will have its thumbnail made), %o to the output file (the thumbnail image) and %s to the size of the thumbnail. These parameters will be automatically substituted with the corresponding data and passed to the thumbnailer program by PCManFM.

Tip: If you only get thumbnails of certain files and not of all the files of the same type try increasing the maximum file size of the files that get a thumbnail at Edit > Preferences > Display.

Set the terminal emulator

You can configure what terminal emulator PCManFM should use for Tools > Open Current Folder in Terminal under Edit > Preferences > Advanced e.g. bash -c 'pantheon-terminal --working-directory "$PWD"'.

Templates are accessible under Create New...

Troubleshooting

Open With dialog window empty

If you do not see any applications to choose from in the open with dialog, then you can try removing gnome-menus and instead install lxmenu-data. Furthermore, export the following variables:

export XDG_MENU_PREFIX=lxde-
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=LXDE

No "Applications"

You can try this method: Delete all files in the $HOME/.cache/menus directory, and run PCManFM again.

PCManFM requires the environment variable XDG_MENU_PREFIX to be set. The value of the variable should match the beginning of a file present in the /etc/xdg/menus/ directory. E.g. you can set the value in your .xinitrc file with the line:

export XDG_MENU_PREFIX="lxde-"

See these threads for more information: [1], and especially this post from the Linux Mint forums: [2]

--desktop parameter not working or crashing X-server

Make sure you have ownership and write permissions on ~/.config/pcmanfm.

Setting the wallpaper either by using the --desktop-pref parameter or editing ~/.config/pcmanfm/default/pcmanfm.config solves the problem.

Terminal emulator advanced configuration not saved

Make sure you have rights on libfm configuration file:

$ chmod -R 755 ~/.config/libfm
$ chmod 644 ~/.config/libfm/libfm.conf

Make PCManFM remember your preferred Sort Files settings

You can use View > Sort Files to change the order in which PCManFM lists the files, but PCManFM won't remember that the next time you start it. To make it remember, go to Edit > Preferences and close. That will write your current sort_type and sort_by values into ~/.config/pcmanfm/LXDE/pcmanfm.conf.

"Not authorized" error when attempting to mount drive

Make this polkit rule in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/00-mount-internal.rules: